This fourth album from the Tokyo-based star is his first international release, raising questions about what we’ve missed. If the dominant instrument is the toy piano, there are nods to the sorts of noises going through Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson’s heads circa 1967, the funfair and music-hall

A “non-denominational and inclusive holiday album”, in the words of the lounge giants — and they mean it. Chinese new year tunes sit alongside a Japanese take on White Christmas and Silent Night in German and Arabic. The singer China Forbes sounds angelic on Santa Baby. Scots may bristle at her

In a month when Fela Kuti’s 40-plus Afrobeat albums have been reissued and the Southbank has reverberated to a musical about his life, his eldest son returns to the fray with what might be his own finest outing. It’s a thrilling dash from first to last, with precious few stops to catch your breath

Guitarist Taylor studied music in London in the 1960s and has been a name in Ghana for six decades. But he had never played in Europe before last year and this is his first international release. It’s straight-ahead Afrobeat, with great shuffling rhythms on two reworkings of earlier songs (the

This is the result of a lengthy sojourn in Jingjiang, China, and is inspired by the music heard either at a people’s park music club or courtesy of Michael Timmins’s rock-savvy acquaintance. Thus there are covers of contemporary songs (Zuoxiao Zuzhou’s I Cannot Sit Sadly By Your Side and Xu Wei’s

This box set claims to include the tropicalia veteran’s three “Estudando” albums, released in Brazil between 1975 and 2008 (A Bossa, O Pagode and O Samba, although the latter is really the Massive Hits collection compiled by David Byrne). Ignore this inaccuracy, however: much of all three (plus a

AfroCubism AfroCubism “I could have done better than that album,” was Bassekou Kouyaté’s reply when asked about his failure to attend the 1996 sessions for the Buena Vista Social Club LP. Now, with fellow Malians Toumani Diabaté, Djelimady Tounkara, Kassé Mady Diabaté and Cubans Eliades Ochoa and

Although licensing means that these 45 tracks skirt the Spanish Harlem giant’s golden era on RCA, this is a grandstand view of a career that hit the big time in 1949, with Abaniquito, and that lasted 50 years. The first disc covers the mambo era, when it jousted with rock’n’roll to be America’s

Partly recorded in Damascus by a trio led by the bassist Bernard O’Neill, Syriana is as much an album as a mood teetering on the tightrope between East and West. Featuring Arabic strings, surf guitar and qanun, a dulcimer beloved of Cold War film soundtracks, these 13 songs concentrate on building